Peace: the 2nd Sunday of Advent 2020

The Advent season reminds us of God's gift of peace. It calls us to remember the writings of the Hebrew prophets who anticipated the coming of a King who would bring peace to all of creation. Peace - a peace unlike what the world has ever known - would flourish as this Messianic king reigned with justice and righteousness - the ways of God. Consequently, this coming king is called the Prince of Peace. 

God's gift of peace permeates all of creation and every dimension of life: peace with God, inner peace, peace in personal relationships through reconciliation, peace among all peoples, peace within creation itself. Each of these dimensions of peace are inter-related. One leads to the other. The lack of one undermines all others. The remainder of this blog focuses on inner peace. Apart from this inner peace, we cannot live in peace with others. This inner peace is grounded in peace with God. (I'll develop that concept in another blog.) 

Both Jesus and Paul spoke of this inner peace. In John 14:27, Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.” In his letter to the Philippians, Paul spoke of “the peace of God which surpasses all understanding,” (Philippians 4:7). Both spoke of the unusual nature of the peace that comes from God. Paul described it as a peace that cannot be understood or explained from a human perspective. Jesus described it as a different kind of peace than what the world gives.

The peace of Christ is an inner reality. It is something we experience deep within, at the core of our being. It is an inner quietness, a deep-seated sense of well-being and safeness. 

The flip side of peace is anxiety. Anxiety is a nebulous feeling of unease or dis-ease that lies just beneath the surface of our lives. It is the unconscious anticipation of something that will hurt us the way we were hurt in the past. Anxiety is the twitching of the old fears. Anxiety is our normal state as human beings. 

Peace, what Jesus called “my peace,” is what quietens anxiety with its nebulous feeling of dis-ease. It displaces the fear, stilling the inner turmoil and settling the inner restlessness. The peace of Christ sets us free from the power of anxiety, breaking its control over us. It sets us free from fear-based thinking and fear-based reactivity. It displaces our anxiety and fear … in the midst of the very situation that spawned the fear in the first place!

 This inner quietness we call peace comes from God. It is referred to as the fruit of the Spirit, the peace that Christ gives, and the peace of God. But it is also rooted in God. It is inseparably tied to God’s faithfulness, what the Hebrew Bible calls the faithful love of God. It is tied to God’s promise to be with us and not abandon us, to God’s promise to bless us and sustain us. It is rooted in God’s power to transform our experiences, bringing life out of death, good out of evil. It is tied to how God uses life’s painful, destructive experiences to enrich and deepen our lives, maturing us in the likeness of Jesus.

Peace is what the Spirit produces in our lives. Peace is not something we can manufacture or produce through self-effort. It is not something we can create or conjure up. It is the product of the Spirit’s work in our lives. While we cannot manufacture peace, we can place ourselves in a position for the Spirit to lead us into peace within.

The journey into peace begins with the awareness of the lack of peace. One would think that the recognition of this inner dis-ease we call anxiety would be easy, but it is not. Anxiety and fear are automatic reactions within us. They happen without our thinking and, thus, outside our awareness. We have to learn to be aware of our anxiety and recognize our fear.  

The recognition of our anxiety and fear presents us with a choice. Do we continue to hold onto our fear (allowing it to hold onto us) or do we choose to move beyond it? Do we live out of our fear or do we choose to let go of it?

When we hold onto our fear, we give our fear control over us.  It holds us in its grip. It shapes our thinking and governs what we do.  Consequently, we react out of old patterns.  

So, the second step on the journey into peace is to manage the anxiety and fear. In John 14:27, where Jesus promised his peace, he said “do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid.” In his letter to the Philippians, Paul exhorted them “do not worry about anything,” (Philippians 4:6). The original language in both texts carries the idea of stop, do not continue. Fear and anxiety are a normal part of our human condition. Jesus’ and Paul’s words do not instruct us to not feel the anxiety and fear. Such is not possible. Rather, they call us to not dwell in our anxiety and fear. “Do not continue to live in your fear, with your fear, and out of your fear.” They call us to move beyond our fear so that our fear does not dictate and control our lives.

Jesus and Paul called us to use our power to manage ourselves. Rather than attempting to control others or our situation, we manage what we are feeling along with the thinking that drives those feelings. We continue to live in fear and with fear only when we scare ourselves with our thinking. 

 The way we manage our anxiety and fear is not by fighting them, not by resisting them, not by seeking to control them. We manage our anxiety and fears by naming them.  We acknowledge them to God. We pray. In doing so, we put ourselves in a position for the Spirit to displace our anxiety with peace, to create an inner quietness in the place of our inner turmoil. Praying our fear is the third step on the journey that leads us into peace. 

The journey into peace follows the path of prayer. Through prayer, we remember, refocus, and reconnect with God so that we can rest in God’s faithful love. Prayer is the way we manage our fears.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul wrote “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” Paul didn’t just say “don’t worry.” He exhorted his readers to manage their anxiety and fear. “Don’t continue to worry. You’re doing it. Stop!” And, then, he told them how to move beyond the worry into peace. He instructed them to pray. Pray the fear. Acknowledge it. Express it. Bring your requests to God. But Paul also instructed the Philippians in how to pray. They were to pray with thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the key to moving beyond fear-based praying. 

Thanksgiving is rooted in remembering. It is looking over our shoulder at the past, remembering God’s faithfulness in past situations. Thanksgiving helps us to remember God and God’s faithfulness. It helps us remember how God was with us even when we couldn’t recognize God’s presence. It helps us remember how God strengthened and sustained us in the midst of our crisis. Thanksgiving helps us remember how God provided what we needed to deal with the crisis. It helps us remember how God transformed the experience, bring good out of evil, life out of death. Thanksgiving helps us recognize how God blessed us and matured us as we walked a road we would rather have not walked. Praying with thanksgiving helps us to remember. And, when we remember, we are in a position to reconnect with God.

Our fear and anxiety blind us to God.  When we are living out of our anxiety and fear, our attention is on the situation. We are focused on the circumstances and on others and on what we are afraid might happen.  In other words, our focus is not on God.  In the midst of our anxiety and fear, the Spirit calls us to refocus on God and, thereby, to reconnect with God.

The Spirit guides us to remember so we can refocus. As we refocus on God, we can reconnect with God. When we reconnect with God, we can then rest in God.

 Remember → Refocus → Reconnect → Rest

 The Spirit leads us to rest in God’s faithful love. Resting involves choosing to let go of our fear and our need to be in control. It involves choosing to trust. This Spirit-directed remembering, this Spirit-directed refocusing, this Spirit-directed reconnecting, this Spirit-empowered resting allows us to experience deep within the kind of peace that passes all human ability to understand or explain it. 

 This journey into peace is not some magic formula that automatically makes everything better. It is a process … a journey.  It is a process of consciously shifting our focus from our situation to God, from frantically worrying about everything “out there” to managing what’s “in here,” from attempting to be in control to turning loose, from doing what we always do to resting. The journey into peace is choosing to trust God’s faithful love. It is choosing to live in glad dependency upon the Spirit.

Peace is that inner quietness in the depth of our being that allows the joy of the Lord to flow in us and through us. As we learn to live with peace and out of peace, we can live as peacemakers in the world (Matthew 5:9). 

(Part of this blog is adapted from my book The Fruit of the Spirit: the Path That Leads to Loving as Jesus Loved.)